Over the past month or so, I’ve been plowing through an extensive stack of resumes to fill some openings on my new team at PBS.

Many of the resumes were sort of sad – those of journalists with impeccable traditional credentials, and no clue what I meant when I asked for work samples that showed creative use of different digital story forms in service of the content.

Call ‘em The Lifeboaters:  “This digital thing is going to be huge, and I’d be proud to learn it from your team!”  Umm, sorry. The ship that you want left 15 years ago. The good news: New ships leave everyday if you’re willing to swim out to the meet them. WordPress.com offers blogs for free. Start there, keep playing, and we’ll talk in a year.

A second pile included people who are incredibly good … at a singular thing. Call ‘em the The One-Skill Wonders: Very adept at slideshows. Or digital video. Or shoveling existing text onto a page. Yes, those are useful skills (and, candidly, they’ve been enough to get very good production jobs at many shops for a long time.) But that’s not what my team is trying to do.

Happily, however, there was a third pile of those resumes: Digital natives (or digital immigrants who work hard to remain conversant) who understand the whiz-bang toys are only useful if they serve the story. They also understand there will be a new whiz-bang tool next year.

My favorite example: One of the candidates is a wizard at a certain vector-graphics program that’s hideously expensive, ridiculously proprietary, notoriously hard to learn – and incredibly useful. Which, of course, leads some to treat it as the Universal Truth to all journalism questions, and to treat themselves as priests.

Not this guy. He wouldn’t bite on my trick question (something about whether this program was the most useful skill he’d ever learned): “The technology is always changing, so I just feel like the ability and willingness to adapt is the best skill someone can have.”

Guess what? He got an interview. So did most of the others in the third pile. They’ll be the ones making up our new team.

It was hard not to notice a few commonalities among them. An awful lot of them passed through Medill at Northwestern, American University in D.C., or Cal-Berkeley. Several also received one of the fabulous summer-long News 21 fellowships.

I’d be horribly remiss if didn’t mention the excellent program at CUNY; as it happens, none of its kids choose to apply. I’d be equally remiss if I didn’t point out that some name-brand journalism schools aren’t on this list – and that’s not an oversight.

The kids in that third stack are solid reporters and great storytellers. When pressed, they talk about technologies as means to an end – tools they can use in service of the story, not as a flashy adornment to it. They also used overly long sentences to offer variations on a motto a longtime colleague used to have on his blog: Semper Gumby – always flexible.)

Of course, one of the people I hired said it far better than I can.

I hope this forms an optimistic riposte to a discerning entry from Wayne MacPhail on PBS’ Media Shift blog. MacPhail makes an impassioned observation that J-schools are failing their students by defaulting to traditional story forms, taught by traditional professors, with barely a mention of the information revolution occurring around us. He’s right.

Too many of my friends – the first-generation digital pioneers now in academe – talk privately about the battles they fight with tenured colleagues who insist that circa-1994 curricula are just fine¸thank you and have served generations of graduates with distinction!

Fortunately for our craft – and for my project – a few schools are taking another path. Some of their grads are going to help us at PBS.

Flipboard automatically generates a list of stories that might interest you, based on links suggested by people you follow on Twitter or your Facebook friends. Storify reverses the flow – it allows you to easily curate a list of readings you recommend, based on your own (or others’) social-media postings.

It’s still early-release stuff – the UI, while clean, is a bit obscure (especially the flow to save, then edit, a Storify “story.”) And, like all new tools, it’ll take a few weeks for the collective “us” to figure out how to best use it. But it’s a neat mashup of technology and journalism, and it’s worth watching.

Why? Tools like this are part of the emerging news ecosystem – how can we tap the experts out there to surface smart stories on important niche topics? It’s a problem – and opportunity – my skunk-works team at PBS is thinking about a lot.

A sample – which I ginned up in all of three minutes based on the intertwined riffs of newspaper brain drains and the reinvention of what Washington journalism can be:

OK, so a raw feed of pertinent tweets isn’t a “story” in a traditional sense. But marry this with a quick text introduction (which I, um, was a bit too lazy to write) and you’ve got the makings of useful information.

A side note: The smart folks at Storify deserve all the kudos. But I’ll point out that my friends at the Knight Fellowships at Stanford can claim godparent status: co-founder Burt Herman spent the last year as a Knight Fellow, thinking about ways to use technology to reinvent journalism.)

And a big hat-tip to MediaBug‘s Scott Rosenberg for the blog post that tipped me to Storify.

(People who make up asinine policies first need to understand the underlying technology.)

Hat tip @JeffJarvis – who will not seek damages for me linking to him.

(Oh – and that jokey lead about hardware stores? Not a joke. I’m so bad that the Fabulous Sue Corbett (trademark pending) jabbed me in a one-act play about Noah’s Ark she wrote for a youth group.

Scene: Noah’s sons talking after God commands their father to build an ark:

Son 1:  You know what this means?

Son 2: Dad has to make a trip to the hardware store.

Dave Morgan

I’ve written before about how Moore’s Law  and its corrolaries in the software world inexorably make web tech cheaper and simpler by the year. But don’t take my word for it. A comment and a software release last week make the point better than I can.

Serial entrepreneur Dave Morgan dropped an offhand comment during his talk at the Borrell Local Online Advertising Conference  in New York last week.

His first startup, Real Media, needed tens of millions in capital when it was started in 1995 just to cover technology costs.  His next, Tacoda Systems, needed single-digit millions to get launched in 2001.

His latest, Simulmedia, founded last year? About a million.

There’s a lesson in there for journalist/entrepreneurs – and it isn’t that you need a million bucks to do something.

“The cost of  building out a massive data storage capacity for ad targeting has dropped enormously because of much cheaper, much more powerful hardware, cheap data centers, open source software (Hadoop & MySQL) v. classic DB (Oracle, etc.),” Dave wrote in a follow-up email.

Moore’s Law in action: The cost of a major tech startup has dropped by almost 100x in 15 years.

 (For those of you who don’t follow ad-tech startups as closely as the Mets, a couple bits of data: Real Media merged with a couple others to form 24/7 Real Media, which was eventually bought by ad-agency conglomerate WPP for $649 million. Tacoda was bought by AOL for $275 million. Dave knows how to make this stuff work.)

Let’s take those forces out of the realm of VC-backed startups, and instead look at the world of independent journalism sites. Their technology needs are merely a fraction of massive advertising analysis companies – and so are the start-up costs.

The radical downward trend of those startup costs follows the same downward spiral, however. A few years ago, you needed a million bucks to get solid, automated content management. Today? Close to free.

I’m an unabashed fan of the blog platform WordPress, and of the easily customized themes produced by many different developers. Even a year ago, getting WordPress to do what you wanted it often required some code tweaks – simpler than building from scratch, but still not for the uninitiated.

Now? One of my favorite development houses, WooThemes, launched a highly customizable theme, appropriately named Canvas, this week. Want to change your site’s look and feel, dramatically? Punch size and color changes into simple menus. Beats opening the underlying PHP code.

One more reason journopreneurs should stop pondering and just launch. So a question, and a challenge, for those still pondering:

What’s stopping you?

The first: Avatar, in all its 3D glory at the local cineplex. James Cameron spent at least $230 million – and maybe as much as half a billion dollars.

The second: Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog, a DVD gift from a hip brother to my 15-year-old. Dr. Horrible cost around $200,000 in up-front cash, maybe double that when you factor in all the donated services. 

Yes, less than one-1,000th the cost of Avatar. (Put another way: Dr. Horrible cost less than six minutes of a mediocre hour-long scripted TV drama like Numb3rs.)

No, the point isn’t whether Avatar is 1,000 times more entertaining than Dr. Horrible. The point is that these two works are terrific in their own way; have vastly different economics; and are producing nice profits for their creators.

Avatar is a stunning piece of visual story-telling. Film geeks will be talking about it for the rest of our lives, in the same way they talk about Star Wars’ visual effects, or The Wizard of Oz’s use of Technicolor.

Dr. Horrible is delicious example of musical story-telling. It mashes together superhero tropes, sharp song-writing and Whedon’s warped world view. (Yes, this means somebody dies, in a particularly gruesome and bizarre way.)

Each exploits its economics: Dr. Horrible used cheap online distribution and Whedon’s built-in base of fans from Buffy, Angel and Firefly to become a viral phenomenon. (To steal the words of an acquaintance: “Who knew Doogie Howser could sing?!”)

All those free online streams and downloads have generated millions in DVD and t-shirt sales. (Conor got the Capt. Hammer t-shirt, too – to cries of “Where’d you GET that?!?” from friends.)

Avatar plays the popcorn-blockbuster game to the logical (if expensive) extreme: video games, fast-foot tie-ins, months of carpet-bombing TV ads for trailers. The IMAX screen at my neighborhood AMC has been packed – at $14 a pop.
The lesson for entrepreneurs: Understand the economics of what you’re trying to do. Exploit them to your benefit.

More on this in another post, about the similar lesson Sears, Target and Nordstrom can teach us. But it’s time listen to Commentary: The Musical! on the Dr. Horrible DVD. Heh.